


Dreaming Spires

by TriffidsandCuckoos



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin
Genre: Gen, Oxford, birthday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-28
Updated: 2012-09-28
Packaged: 2017-11-15 05:16:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/523558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriffidsandCuckoos/pseuds/TriffidsandCuckoos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The possibilities of an urban sorcerer in a different city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreaming Spires

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarlingGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarlingGirl/gifts).



Ah, yes. Urban sorcerers. Hardly something about which you’d need to come to me.

Ask around. People might not like it, but they can tell you a thing or two about us.

Once upon a time, we were everywhere. Britain used to have one of the highest populations of sorcerers – or infestations, depending on how charming your vocabulary. You can blame London for that: it attracts us as surely as New York or Paris or Tokyo. Unfortunately, more than a few years ago, our capital became…well, you might say toxic. Not like Chernobyl, obviously, or Berlin, where the split ate at you until there was nothing but confusion and loss. (Mind you, if you ever needed a decent barrier spell, Berlin sorcerers were the ones to go to. Same for surveillance, but you certainly did not want to mention that to them.) I mean ‘toxic’ as in deadly for the unprepared. Robert James Bakker was simply delightful that way.

Only some us survived, simply by Not Being There. Like me, for instance.

Why?

London is hardly my sort of city.

To be an urban sorcerer, you tap into the life of a city. That's all. Life is magic. If you're out in the country, you're dead – unless you can readjust your perspective far faster than the average human being is willing to do – but anywhere else? You can find something. 

(One tip, though: don't go to Manchester unless you're ready to deal with the territorial type.)

I know I confuse people. I do understand. My city of choice isn't obvious. If you spread out a map of the United Kingdom, I can guarantee you wouldn't see it as an option. Not after Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Swansea, Birmingham, Bristol, city after city after city, all with their glowing darknesses and the shimmering trails of lorries and commuters tracing the arteries and veins always back to the heart of London.

My city's special. It likes to think of itself that way.

My city isn't the Smoke or the Big Apple. 

It's the Dreaming Spires.

Oxford.

More to it than a university, you know.

Not that our ancient university doesn't matter. It does. It's woven in, layer upon layer, stone after stone of history and rivalries and wars - inter-collegiate, town versus gown, inter-city. So much blood running through our streets, just waiting for the right sorcerer to draw on it. Start at the Viking or the Battle of St Scholastica Day and keep going, on and on. Sooner or later, we'll fight anyone. The same way we'd die ourselves before a tradition did, or a grudge centuries in the living.

I can scry better than any London sorcerer, because all the knowledge is there for the taking. 'If knowledge is power' isn't a vague philosophical remark here. I've wrought spells in the depths of Bodleian you couldn't imagine. I can weave enchantments of secrecy; spin a disguise out of dust; vanish into a library's shadows; discover anything because we all know that it's just the matter of finding the right book.

It's not like the Other Place. Not at all. I don't grow nearly as dull in the summer, with the hum of the tourists and the Town coming to life. All that changes is that I spill out into the sunlight with the rest, drinking Pimms and punting and avoiding my job as much as any other citizen. I bask in the open-air shows, performing alongside the rest to dazzle with what people believe can happen. 

I might not be a weather wizard the way anybody else might claim to be, but I'm a dab hand at those sharp showers that appear out of nowhere, same as the sun when you're trapped inside with your work. (Oh, incidentally, any talk of controlling British weather is pure hokum, trust me. Nobody can. Not since the Celts trying to keep out the Romans let loose something they never stood a chance of controlling.)

I haven't slept a single April 30th night in my life, and May Morning always dawns magical and slightly drunk. 

I may be an urban sorcerer, but enough of the city is willing to hike out to Port Meadow if it means staying up all night for a tradition.

No, I do not understand tube trains as much as the law of buses and coaches, and chaos on the High. For me, the screech of brakes signals a cyclist and a curse about the bloody students. You might call me ‘quirky’, I suppose, because I bathe in a life that is willing to position a fake shark in a roof purely because it can. Pubs with old crests and old friends; graffiti that quotes Shakespeare and questions philosophically; the ability for centuries of history to fade into the background as just another five-hundred-year-old building. I can raise cobbles that actively attack your feet; call on the smug satisfaction of the Tories and the bitter anger of hundreds of people opening their housing bills; draw energy from the endless excitement of tourists.

If need be, I can call on a bit of London – not that I enjoy it. People believe Oxford is essentially London, and as much as I hate it with every local, like every local I'm not above exploiting that. London can take it. Besides, I have it on good authority there's something of us lurking in its tourist streets as well.

But we are not London, no matter what tourists might think based on our shops just for them. We are our own entity. We have our own rules, our own lives and our own magic.

The hustle and bustle of Cowley; the far calmer streets of Headington, save for the pockets of insanity; Summertown, lying in wait for something. Pockets of students amongst the rumble of real life. The unloved districts of student houses outside of termtime, when the life dies down to a trickle and the night-time crawls with those wondering if it would really be so bad just to take. The walk to the station when you accidentally emerge out of the past and find yourself by modern glass and pizza takeaways, normality and a tourist heart jostling for space. The islands of green where runners live longer and bottles are opened and fireworks and rowers each have their day; the struggle of Headington Hill, impossibly uphill one way and impossibly downhill the other; the injuries of the JR, people hoping this one trip will be the only one necessary; the sullen resentment and sheer pride of Brookes, determined to never think of itself as the Other University. Always people, always moving, throughout the centuries, always living, always dying.

Never past the ring road, though. No matter what, you never go past the ring road.

I don’t get to do that walk so much these days. Not that I don’t want to, obviously, and on the days when the students come and go, I can’t help but try to follow. But now, responsibilities do keep interfering. Life – magic – is rather inconvenient that way.

My speciality? Why you come to me and nobody else?

The knowledge. There's always the knowledge. Not only is there the Bodleian and almost a thousand years of intelligence haunting the streets; there is the history. 

And that's the thing about me: I preserve things. Best woman you can find for that, trust me. I don't let things die.

Rumours and whispers and plaques. Tradition. People whom London would have absorbed and layered under its streets long ago. I keep everything. I can trap ghosts and lock you into a book. I can befuddle you by diving into the cataloguing system, conjure barriers that need Bod Cards, and suffocate you with the dust of centuries and the screams of students who never bloody signed up for this.

Why would you find an urban sorcerer in Oxford? 

Why would you find one down here?

If you've been asking around about us, you might well have stumbled upon a respectable institution in London. Or rather, one that was once respectable. These days it has fallen instead to the man it needed, not the man it might have wanted. If you're asking around, you must have heard of Matthew Swift, the Midnight Mayor.

Oxford has its own share of institutions. The eternal students, already in the library when you arrive in the morning and still there when you leave at night. The _other_ University board. The Morris Men, who dance every year and melt away again when the clock strikes midday. The Bellringer. The Busker – a good friend of the Beggar King, always reading to juggle fire or play pop songs on a harp. 

And there is me. 

I exist because people believe I must exist. I exist because people want me to exist. I exist because I have to exist.

The books are a mess and people never put them back when they should. You can’t have a magic section without somebody to control the nosy and the ignorant. If you lot were let loose in here without me, this place would soon crumble to the ground.

I’m not like those I just so kindly listed for you. You’d think I’d come into being like the rest, but that’d be the one upstairs. The one who really did come into being based on enough people believing that they existed. The one for whom I am but the tolerated liaison.

Not to mention…well, I won’t mention what did happen to my own predecessor. I spent a little too long down here. I got a job.

You want knowledge? Knowledge of the things you had to come here in particular to see?

You want to find a magic book that actually exists?

I am the Librarian.

Have your Bod Card at the ready.

**Author's Note:**

> While I am Town these days, I apologise that this is still rather Gown-centric.


End file.
